With 2017 now behind us, we thought this would be a great time to reflect on what the year brought us, and to prepare for what 2018 may bring! From Cloud to DevOps to IoT, there was certainly a lot to learn and still plenty of room for growth.

Some of our most shocking revelations were the rise of serverless architecture and seeing companies finally take security head-on, especially in regards to IoT. In 2018, we will see more data collection and analysis as a means to help improve security and the proliferation of mobile automation.

There’s so much more that we learned and are looking forward to in regards to Cloud, DevOps, IoT, Java and mobile.

Cloud

2017 Surprise: The biggest surprise is that after being declared dead in previous years, PaaS has risen from the grave as “serverless architecture” — Gil Tayar

2018 Prediction: Serverless will continue to grow as a paradigm whereby your application doesn’t care where and how it runs — Gil Tayar

DevOps

2017 Surprise: Docker surprised everyone by declaring support for Kubernetes in Docker EE (alongside their own Docker Swarm), thus ceding victory and confirming that Kubernetes will be, for 2018, the industry standard orchestrator for Microservices. — Gil Tayar

2018 Prediction: Kubernetes will continue to grow and secure its place as the leading orchestrator for Microservices. The three big cloud vendors will support managed Kubernetes — Gil Tayar

IoT

2017 Surprise: With the widespread adoption of IoT development, IoT security had evolved from a theoretical problem to an actual issue to deal with — Daniel Puterman

2018 Predictions: With the appearance of cheap deep learning acceleration in hardware, in 2018 we will start seeing smarter IoT devices coming to the market. From computer vision based sensors to voice activated window shades — the world around us will become smarter, and more adaptive to our needs — Ram NathanielIn addition to security, IoT data collection and analysis will become the next target of companies and entrepreneurs in the data science field — Daniel Puterman

Java

2017 Surprises: Kotlin comes from seemingly nowhere to dethrone the Java emperor, with the backing of two heavyweights of the field: Google and Jetbrains — Gil Tayar

It’s a surprise that with the rise of JVM based alternatives (such as Kotlin for Android development & Scala for data science), Java usage hadn’t actually declined. I expect that 2018 will show the same trend — Java development will continue to take a large portion of software development — Daniel Puterman

2018 Prediction: Kotlin will continue eating away at Java’s dominance of the non-MS enterprise market. It will be a long while till Java will be dethroned, but it will happen — Gil Tayar

Mobile

2017 Surprise: Was the year mobile automation frameworks entered the mainstream mobile development lifecycle, with the appearance of Espresso for Android and XCUI for iOS — Daniel Puterman

2018 will continue to make mobile automation more prevalent, specifically with mobile cloud environments becoming more reliable — Daniel Puterman

What do you think? We’d love to hear some of your predictions and reflections on the world of software delivery and testing. 2018 should be another exciting, fast-paced year — we can’t wait to see what it has in store!